Commentary on the Confluence of War, Technology, and Culture

Weapons Technology and ‘Modernist’ Social Change

Richard Machowicz of Discovery’s Future Weapons offers an intriguing list of the “Weapons that Changed the World.” The top ten includes the RPG-7, the JDAM, the B-52 bomber, the nuclear submarine, the Huey UH-1C attack helicopter, the S-75 Dvina high-altitude surface-to-air missile system, the F-117A stealth fighter, the AK-47, the ICBM, and the military industrial complex.

Several things struck me about Machowicz’s list. First, the current tension between the needs of counterinsurgency and conventional state-on-state warfare is apparent when technology like the RPG-7 appears next to the F-117A. (After all, how might a COIN theorist’s list differ from a RMA-minded person? From a COIN mindset, the list seemed somehow ‘dated’ to me.) Secondly, I have to wonder whether some of these technologies had a greater impact on culture than they did on the battlefield. For example, the S-75 Dvina pushed the United States to develop countermeasures and new surveillance methods, but the 1960 U-2 incident had a cultural impact above and beyond the technological leap this one SAM system represented.

This leads me to two important questions. What does it mean for weapons technology to change the world? More importantly, how do we understand this change? Perry Anderson, a historian and literary theorist, proposes a theory that might be useful in this context.* In “Modernism and Revolution,” he analyzes “Modernist” social movements and the change they represented. As you may know, Modernism is a term applied to various artistic movements including but by no means limited art, architecture, literature, and film, which constituted a radical break from the past. Examples include authors such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, artists such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisee, and many others. However, Modernism is more than an isolated artistic ideal. Einstein contributions to physics, Freud’s developments in psychoanalysis, and Keynes’ economic theories all represent significant “Modernist” moments in their capacity to change the world. Another, less recognized Modernist is Giulio Douhet, one of the fathers of air power theory. Douhet was an amateur novelist, painter, and poet, whose contributions led to a Modernist revolution in war making.

What do these world-changing moments have in common? Anderson suggests that they emerge at the intersection of three key coordinates: academicism, technology, and the proximity of social revolution. In terms of academicism, it is not enough for an modernist event to happen. Rather, there must be an academic theorization that attempts to define and articulate that event. The second component is a new or improved technology that changes the way we view the world: mass production, the automobile, the airplane, radio, television, the personal computer, et. al. Lastly, social revolution according Anderson is Marxist upheaval of the socioeconomic order, but I have broadened this include other forms of radical social change: the American revolution, decolonization, the atomic age, and many others.

Do the moments in which these weapons changed the world conform to these three coordinates? Some do, certainly. In very obvious ways, the atomic bomb and the ICBM changed how the United States and other powers waged war. In the immediate wake of these advances, the Army struggled to become “high-tech” as the Air Force received increased funding and standing within the military establishment. Victory and occupation had entirely new implications that decreased the value of conventional military force and increased the need for paramilitary operations. The world had been changed.

Today, there is little doubt we face one of these revolutionary moments. Theorists like Montgomery McFate attempt to grapple with the challenges of counterinsurgency, technologies like the RPG-7 have enabled insurgencies to wage asymmetric war effectively, and the rise of radical, supranational groups like Al-Qaida threaten to overthrow the established social other. These three coordinates are but one, reductive look at a much more complex moment in which we live. The important thing to acknowledge is that the weapons themselves are only one component of radical change. Indeed, even these “weapons that changed the world” would be nothing without radical changes in thinking and social order of the moment.

* – See Perry Anderson, “Modernism and Revolution,” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Gary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1988).

“If by chance you were to ask me which ornaments I would desire above all others in my house, I would reply, without much pause for reflection, arms and books.”
—Fra Sabba da Castiglione, Knight of St. John